Field of the Invention
The embodiments described herein are generally directed to various components of a control infrastructure.
Description of the Related Art
Currently, there exists a need to unify and streamline the domains of industrial control and home automation. While both domains share the same basic goal of controlling external devices, there are massive differences and complexity in the existing solutions available for each field.
For instance, in the domain of industrial control, systems are generally hand-crafted, by systems integration companies, to the complex requirements of each specific customer. Even when such integration is based on widely-available components, the configuration of those components vary from one integration to the next, thereby driving up the cost of industrial automation systems. These costs include both the initial development costs, as well as the costs for maintenance and upgrades. Thus, the domain of industrial control would benefit from a building-block architecture that is capable of interfacing with virtually any device, but which is simple enough to be constructed and configured by less sophisticated users. Such de-sophistication of industrial control could eliminate the need for the middlemen (i.e., systems integration companies) and drive down the development and maintenance costs to customers.
In the domain of home automation, price constraints are, by necessity, much tighter than in the domain of industrial control. Accordingly, only relatively simple forms of control and automation can be attempted by the average consumer. Unfortunately, there are currently a large number of incompatible and overlapping architectures available in the domain of home automation. Thus, the domain of home automation would benefit from an architecture that can handle all potential underpinnings, and which can be rapidly, inexpensively, and continuously upgraded as new technologies emerge.
In addition, there currently exists a wide diversity of silo'ed transport protocols for each vertically-oriented market solution. For residential applications, there exist X-10™, ZigBee™, Z-Wave™, and Komex™. For commercial applications, there exist BACnet™ and Lonworks™. For lighting applications, there exists DALI™. For industrial applications, there exists Modbus™, ProfileBus™, DeviceNet™, and ControlNet™. For automotive applications, there exists CAN-Bus™. For metering applications, there exists M-Bus™.
Accordingly, what is needed is a control infrastructure that can unify the various control domains with a platform-independent, protocol-independent, transport-independent, scalable, distributed, building-block architecture.